Oh, was that why? When I was a kid, we were told it was because it was in the nightshade family, so they assumed it would be as poisonous as deadly nightshade. (Which didn’t really make sense to me, since so many foods, from potatoes to green peppers to eggplants, are also nightshades, and you never heard that story about them, but whatever.)
So how would you feel if, instead of genetically breeding pigs to not suffer, we just lobotomize them as piglets instead?
According to a quick google, yes; however that may have not been accurate (it being the internet). Wikipedia mentions the nightshade explananation and not the lead poisoning one.
(One supposed they both explanations might be true, but for now it may be safer to stick with the nightshade theory. Sorry for spreading misinformation, if I did.)
I’m a calloused heartless bastard who doesn’t care what happens to my food before I eat it. I suppose I am vaguely in favor of not torturing the things for the sport of it, but face it, the things are being raised to die. If they want to try one method or another of easing the little porkers’ pain to get the animal rights people off their back, it’s all fine with me as long as the food’s good when it hits my plate.
I will never eat a zombie pig.
Because, you see, they are not kosher.
I’d speculate that a zombie cow would not be kosher due to all that stuff in the Talmud about not treating animals cruelly.
In Soviet Zombiestan, zombie pig eats you!
I’m pretty sure cows are zombies already. 
Nah. If they were zombies ya couldn’t kill 'em with a single slash of the neck. Kosher butchers would have to destroy the brain with a special ritual shotgun.
Given a choice between an animal altered to suffer less and one that suffers normally, I’ll go for the former. The argument that it’s wrong to alter animals with genetic engineering for our pleasure/convenience doesn’t work very well unless you also oppose the existence of all domestic animals. Selective breeding is genetic engineering too, just a low tech, slow and sloppy version. Compared to their wild ancestors, domestic animals are already “zombies”.
As for the “gut” or “icky” factor, if I paid attention to that I’d starve to death. There isn’t any kind of food that can’t be looked upon as “icky”, especially if you pay close attention to it.
If we could deactivate the gene sequence for batshit crazy in PETA members, we wouldn’t have to see stories like this.
The traditional way of declaring the bomb-ees eeevil terrorist subhumans is much cheaper. It is also great if the enemy believes that dying at our hands makes them martyrs. That way, killing them makes them joyous.
Different standards apply to people and animals, so no.
See the post right before yours. Dehumanizing our enemies is a centuries-old tradition, and thus a centuries-old ethical dilemma. Once we can claim that we can eliminate the suffering itself, well…I’ll leave the end result to your imagination.
Since people who dehumanize their enemies either don’t care about the suffering they inflict or actively enjoy it, I doubt it would make a bit of difference.
to those who dehumanize enemies, it probably won’t make a bit of difference, but to those who are on the fence about opposing them it just might turn the tide, one way or the other.
A pig who can’t even show distress at their conditions isn’t a good thing.
I don’t like it because it’s a transparent excuse to treat the animals worse than they would be otherwise. Just because they don’t suffer doesn’t mean we should feel okay about mistreating them. People in vegetative states probably don’t feel it if you punch them, but somehow that doesn’t make it okay to abuse people in residential care either, right?
And I doubt that people would resist the temptation to mistreat them. Look at goldfish. You know the whole “goldfish only have a three second memory” idea? It’s a myth. Why was it created? So they could sell people small bowls. People don’t feel as guilty about keeping them in too small containers if they think the fish doesn’t remember swimming around the cramped space.
If they aren’t suffering, then they aren’t being mistreated.
Those are damaged people, not animals. Not the same thing.
Assuming that all that is true for the moment, it’s irrelevant. If we are lied to about fish’s memory or about the ability of an engineered animal to suffer, then the immorality involved is the lying, not the actions of those that were fooled. And the solution in this case is to get the genetic engineering right. The problem with using “They’ll just lie to us and mistreat the animals” as an argument against this sort of genetic engineering is that the people who do so will do so regardless of genetic engineering. It’s a completely separate issue.
It seems like it would be feasible to genetically make pigs with only enough brain to keep the heart and lungs going and to make the muscles work using electrodes. We’d feed the microencephalic (anencephalic? what’s the cutoff?) pigs using tubes and remove their waste using tubes, making the pig itself a complex tube that jiggles and gets fat. No complex brain means no thought, so no suffering. Ethically, such pigs would be a blank just as a laptop or a diesel engine is a blank.
Those people who like eating pig brains would have to content themselves with brains from unmodified pigs or porcine neural tissue grown (you guessed it) in vats. Since the neural tissue would never coalesce into anything nearly as complex as a nerve fiber, let alone a brain, it wouldn’t think or feel any more than skin tissue does.
Does this help to bracket the discussion here? If yes, I have something rational to work from. If no, well, I don’t. I’m not going to discuss this with people who think there is a seat of thought and suffering other than the brain unless they can provide the mother of all peer-reviewed studies.
And, yes, check my sig.
In theory, you are completely right. In practice, the two issues are about as connected as Siamese twins.
THERE we are! For some reason, yesterday a search for “cannibalism” and the username “Derleth” brought up nothing at all. Which, I suppose, you might consider a *good *thing. 
My sentiments exactly. There shouldn’t be that much lag time between the time we’re able to create zombie pigs that feel no crowding anxiety, and the time we’re able to grow pig tissue in a vat.
In what way ? As I said, banning or allowing this technology to go forward won’t cause people who lie about the treatment of animals to change how they treat animals. Do you have any reason to believe otherwise ?